[svlug] Postfix for the Red Hat impaired

[Wayne Earl]

Constantly lamenting that by using Red Hat (no distro wars, please) I'm
stuck with sendmail, I set out to get rid of this security
nightmare. 

First, I went to qmail. qmail, bluntly stated, sucks (and this comes from
a djb admirer, license be damned ;-) ). Next, I went to exim, with mixed
results. The rpm is rolled straight from the Debian release (read: no, it
didn't work). Compiling from source was a pain, as exim uses a
non-standard Makefile setup that I couldn't get working right on my
machine. What a pain.

Just to humor myself, I trolled around Red Hat's website, and actually
came across Postfix installation instructions. These live at: 

http://www.redhat.com/support/docs/howto/RH-postfix-HOWTO/book1.html

And thus I exclaimed, "Ahah!" (Well, I said something else, but this is a
"family" mailing list....)

And now postfix is installed, freeing me from the hell that is
sendmail. Interestingly enough, I had to remove not only the sendmail rpm,
but also the fetchmail rpm for it to work. Once both are removed, I
installed the postfix rpm, which can be found at:
 
http://www.pobox.com/~sjmudd/postfix/RPMS

Reinstalled the fetchmail rpm, tweaked the postfix configs according to
Red Hat's HOWTO, and it worked.

Note that for some unknown reason, if you don't remove the fetchmail rpm
before installing postfix, fetchmail no longer works. Re-installing it
following the postfix install automagically gets it working again. I have
to figure this one out at a later date.

Rejoice, my Linux brothers and sisters! Cast off your sendmail chains,
join us and share the software (You'll be freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...).

Muhaha.

-- 
Wayne Earl
wayne at qconcepts.net
http://www.qconcepts.net
gpg key fingerprint: 2B98 4A92 2C4A 9BD9 81B3 6534 01BE 1302 B52C 40BE